Whose Space

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ben Werdmuller[Edit][Delete]: Whose Space, E-learning, Web 2.0 and the World [Edit][Delete] May 17, 2006

This is a good article. It captures my own discontent with social networking sites (concerns I have expressed, say, in Public Spaces, Private Places and The Semantic Social Network). The author writes, "The model for the new web economy seems to be to run a single, centralised service that acts as a carrier for advertising... Result: "new" media is subject to the same business interests as the old media. This is a mistake." Ad-driven sites, whether content or application driven, depend on centralization, because they depend on traffic. And centralized sites, sooner or later, are subject to control. More...